He turned back toward his amp for a moment to adjust a knob before returning to his microphone.
“This one’s in the same key.”
He cocked his head to the side as he adjusted the guitar to his side.
“You’re not supposed to do that.”
Finally — someone admitted there were rules to this. And yet, who exactly had made these rules? The manager in the back of the house, or off on the wings? Or were we the umpires, to have been unsatisfied if the whole setlist were sequenced haphazardly and without careful restriction, complaining that all their songs sounded the same.
As I thought about a boring show, I also wondered if talking about the rules was probably another unwritten rule of gigging, some version of the fourth wall best left kept up as an invisible curtain.
